Ruslan Demchak
We recently published articles about Petro Poroshenko's "Mezhyhirya" and the equally impressive "hut" of his puppet prosecutor, Shokin . What's surprising here isn't so much the squalid scale of their "family nests" as the fact that people who came to power riding the wave of the fight against the values of Yanukovych and his friends themselves share those values. But this is surprising only at first glance. A closer look at them, and even more so at the teams they brought to power, reveals that they had no intention of changing anything. Take, for example, Petro Poroshenko's loyal friend and fellow countryman, BPP MP Ruslan Yevhenovych Demchak. How is he different from Arbuzov, the "Family" banker, or the young oligarch Kurchenko? Just look at his life and career to see that he differs from these aforementioned "young and up-and-coming" individuals only in his place of residence. His is not from Donetsk, but from Vinnytsia, just like Petro Alekseevich’s.
The foundation of Ruslan Evgenievich's wealth is the UBG corporation (Ukrainian Business Group). He began as an accountant under the patronage of Oleg and German Andes, businessmen from Odessa. German Edmundovich is rumored to have a great liking for handsome men. But these are just rumors. The fact is, during the "reign" of Oleksandr Klymenko at the Tax Inspectorate, he was appointed head of the alcohol and tobacco production control department. Clearly, someone far removed from the "Family" wouldn't be appointed to such a lucrative position. Apparently, these old "family" connections continue to benefit Mr. Andes and his beloved former accountant, Ruslan Demchak. But we'll talk about that a little later. Back then, in the mid-1990s, Ruslan Evgenievich was just learning how to invest. However, in those years, this type of activity had a somewhat different meaning.
Demchak himself has some interesting stories to tell about his early career. The investment group he founded, Initiative, was searching for classified information about the owners of company shares (one can only speculate how this information was collected), opened an office near the plant, and bought shares cheaply from the owners—plant workers—who were then given these shares in exchange for vouchers. In other words, he obtained insider information through clearly corrupt means, and then, taking advantage of people's financial illiteracy, scammed them out of the property. In short, he was engaged in corporate raiding for beginners. And, most interestingly, Ruslan Evgenievich speaks about this quite openly and freely in interviews. This is how the companies Stroyindustriya, Khimfavorit, and Stroymekhanizatsiya ended up in his hands. He sold all these businesses using the same scheme: first, he transferred ownership to his brother, then bankrupted them, thereby "killing" the remaining shareholders, and then sold them, apparently as a bankrupt, for a small official sum, plus some black cash, to evade taxes. And it was Initiative that became the foundation of his future UBG group.
Ruslan Demchak
The Ukrainian Business Group has opened numerous companies, but the understanding that the Ukrainian population can be taken for fools remains. For example, back in 2007, the insurance company Dobrobut, part of this group, in Kyiv's Darnytskyi district, was foisting insurance receipts on people along with utility bills. These bills listed insurance as "mandatory." Trusting pensioners went and paid, only to later discover they didn't have to pay. Whether such a campaign could have been carried out without corruption and the involvement of local authorities is a question. We believe it's rhetorical. However, those who paid for insurance with Dobrobut and then applied for payments were also denied under a variety of pretexts. It's generally quite difficult to get your money back from this insurance company. Dobrobut ranked at the bottom of insurance company payout ratings, and in 2012, it declared bankruptcy, ripping off all its clients. However, by 2011, the only people left in the offices were secretaries, who couldn't answer a single question. Even after the bankruptcy, Dobrobut continued selling insurance for a couple of years, only now completely illegally. But these are just minor details, highlights of the story. Demchak was already making his money elsewhere.
There were many schemes, and Ruslan Evgenievich worked like a bee. He was involved in illegal land acquisitions. To do this, he resorted to outright forgery, registering himself, his brother, his wife, and a bunch of other acquaintances on forged documents, which made them shareholders in collective farms. He thus obtained land shares in the Cherkasy and Zhytomyr regions. He later sold these lands, "earning" about 100 million hryvnias. He also failed to pay taxes on this money, which is how he got caught, but more on that later. Almost simultaneously with the land scams, his ERDE Bank was engaged in financial fraud. These scams appeared more complex than the land ones. Money was transferred to the accounts of certain companies registered with the aforementioned bank as payment for fictitious promissory notes. They were then cashed at bank branches and passed on to those who needed them. In essence, ERDE Bank was one of the largest conversion centers, mass-producing this criminal enterprise. The withdrawals were so large that armed security guards from the Vulcan company and armored vehicles were required. It's clear that sooner or later, fraud on this scale would attract the attention of the relevant authorities. And they did. The first time they approached him was in connection with his insurance company, Dobrobut, which we wrote about above. The police even seized the company's servers. But the case was somehow hushed up.
But in 2012, Ruslan Demchak was finally arrested and placed in pretrial detention. At the time, he was running in polling station No. 18 in the Vinnytsia region. His opponent in this constituency was Hryhoriy Kaletnik, a member of the Party of Regions and former governor of Vinnytsia Oblast. Both Ruslan Demchak and opposition journalists claimed at the time that he had imprisoned his courageous and promising rival. This, at the very least, raises doubts. In fact, the cases against Demchak were opened based on appeals from MPs Volodymyr Ariev and Oleh Novikov. Both were members of the opposition faction "Our Ukraine – People's Self-Defense" in 2012. Ruslan Demchak's current boss, the leader of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, was also a member of this faction. The most ironic thing is that Volodymyr Ariev is still in the same faction as Ruslan Demchak. I wonder how they interact, and even just look at each other, during faction meetings and at party parties? Especially since Ariev is an ideological patriot and pro-European integrationist, while Demchak behaves, to put it mildly, unpatriotically. But let's leave that fact more to the conscience of "patriot" Ariev.
At the very least, Demchak himself has no desire to defend the Motherland. He's still quite young and is obligated to fulfill his military duty. The military enlistment office reminded him of this by sending him a summons. But the deputy from the presidential party itself didn't want to show by example how to love Ukraine and, apparently, simply didn't show up at the enlistment office.
Moreover, his UBG corporation conducts its financial transactions through Russia's Sberbank. Perhaps this is precisely where his connections to the Adens brothers and, through them, to Alexander Klimenko, who is currently hiding in Russia, come into play. In any case, it's a troubling situation. Ukraine and the rest of the world are imposing sanctions against the Russian banking sector, yet a representative of the presidential faction calmly and unabashedly conducts financial transactions through the largest bank in the aggressor country. And, according to rumors, he has already transferred several hundred thousand dollars to Russia.
Ruslan Demchak is currently a Verkhovna Rada deputy from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc and deputy head of the Committee on Financial Policy and Banking. This means he's doing something in which he has experience, a very specific expertise. With his talents as a schemer, such a position could be quite rewarding. So, it seems Ukrainians can expect new, even larger, scams.
Denis Ivanov, for SKELET-info
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